False allegations: a short case study

Justice: weeding out the truth from the lies... well trying to at least

When we think of false allegations the thing that comes
to mind, for me at least, is rape.
Everything about sexual offences is controversial. There are people who believe that false rape
allegations are rife and their polar opposites who cannot accept that anybody
would ever lie about such a thing. For
what it’s worth, I fall in the middle. I
know that some people lie about being the victim of sexual offences (and all
sorts of other offences for that matter) and I also think that most complainants
are honest.

When I say I know some people make false complaints I
mean I have acted in two cases where I have no doubt at all that false
allegations of sexual assaults were made – I’ve also acted in far more where I
believed every word spoken by the victim(s).
But, today’s blog isn’t about sex (sorry if that disappoints you); today
is about a false allegation of another type.

I recently advised a man who I am very confident had been
the victim of a false allegation that he held a knife to the throat of a woman
and threatened to kill her. The
complainant named the suspect saying that she had known him for many years as a neighbour,
albeit that they had not had contact for nearly a decade.

Why do I say that this was a false allegation? Well for a start he had an alibi and not one
from his mum! His alibi is that he was
home awaiting a delivery and the delivery slot has been confirmed by the
delivery company. My second reason is
that the complainant has made multiple false allegations against this man in
the past and has been convicted of wasting police time after she falsely
claimed he had a gun, causing armed police to kick in the door of the home he
shares with his partner and children.

The frustrating thing is that there isn’t very much the police
can do to help this man. As the officer
said, the police cannot prove conclusively that the allegation is malicious. It’s possible that it did happen and the
suspect is very convincing; it’s also possible that it never happened. It might even be that it did happen by the
complainant really was threatened but misidentified the suspect. The police just cannot prove it one way or
another.

As a police officer once told me, “people make false
complaints to us all the time”. The real
problem for everyone (because any of us might receive a letter on Monday
morning requiring us to attend court to sit on a jury) is separating the false
complaints from the genuine.

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I am a solicitor-advocate who specialises in motoring law with a particular interest in representing clients who have been charged with criminal driving offences involving alcohol, such as drink driving and failing to provide a specimen of breath.